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    The Informers
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    The Informers
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    The Informers
    Ebook255 pages3 hours

    The Informers

    By Bret Easton Ellis

    3/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    From the New York Times bestselling author of American Psycho and Less Than Zero comes a nihilistic novel set in the early eighties that portrays a chilling descent into the abyss beneath L.A.'s gorgeous surfaces. • “Skillfully accomplishes its goal of depicting a modern moral wasteland…. Arguably Ellis's best.” —The Boston Globe

    The basis of the major motion picture starring Billy Bob Thornton, Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke, The Informers is a seductive and chillingly nihilistic novel, in which Bret Easton Ellis, returns to Los Angeles, the city whose moral badlands he portrayed so unforgettably in Less Than Zero.

    This time is the early eighties. The characters go to the same schools and eat at the same restaurants. Their voices enfold us as seamlessly as those of DJs heard over a car radio. They have sex with the same boys and girls and buy from the same dealers. In short, they are connected in the only way people can be in that city.

    Dirk sees his best friend killed in a desert car wreck, then rifles through his pockets for a last joint before the ambulance comes. Cheryl, a wannabe newscaster, chides her future stepdaughter, “You're tan but you don't look happy.” Jamie is a clubland carnivore with a taste for human blood. 

    Look for Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel, The Shards!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateJun 9, 2010
    ISBN9780307756442
    Unavailable
    The Informers
    Author

    Bret Easton Ellis

    Bret Easton Ellis is the author of several novels, including Imperial Bedrooms, Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, Glamorama and Lunar Park, and a collection of stories, The Informers. Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho and The Informers have all been made into films. His first work of non-fiction, White, was published in 2019. He is the host of the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast available on Patreon. He lives in Los Angeles.

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    Reviews for The Informers

    3/5

    483 ratings8 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This book didn't turn out to be as great as I expected. While I found it a fairly entertaining read, mostly due to the setting and the characters and their crazy lifestyles, it didn't do that much for me story-wise. The fact that I didn't read it straight through didn't help. The book consists of loosely interconnected stories, and I kept getting the characters confused whenever I started on a new one. Still, this is my first Bret Easton Ellis novel, and I'd still like to try some of his other works.
    • 4/5
      This is a scathing diatribe about soulless people in LA. Parents who cannot communicate with their children, children who can’t get what they want, vampires who crave even more blood and cars that everyone is worried will break down on the way to a must-not-be-missed concert. Told in first person from the perspective of the many who sound the same, Ellis is descriptive and unrelentingly bleak.
    • 3/5
      Collection of short stories set in LA in the early-mid 80s, using many of the same characters. Basically an inferior riff on the themes of Less Than Zero - the characters are drugged and bored out of any emotional connection with the world, which makes the book tough to engage with at first, until the later stories show what that state of affairs leads to and some outlandish horror occurs almost unnoticed. Decent enough by the end, but basically the same ground he covered in a far more impressive novel a decade earlier.
    • 4/5
      Did anything happen in this book? Interwoven short stories with Ellis' signature tone (immediately in the characters' present, dry satire, apathy, detachment) and subject (1980s wealthy elite, dark sex stained with gore and death). The tone is stronger than the action/plot of the title so I'm left wondering what happened. I also want to go buy myself some happiness, cocaine and ennui. Ellis does show just how miserable materialism can make you, without being preachy or trite, while simultaneously making you want the privileges of materialism. You're left feeling uncomfortable and without a moral message. I also wonder why he titled the book The Informers. Is it too simplistic to ask who are the informers and what are they informing us?
    • 4/5
      I love the way Brett Easton Ellis writes; I just don't like what he writes about.He takes things too far.I was fascinated by the world he created in The Informers — not so much a novel as a collection of overlapping stories, each vignette told in the first person by a different character — but a few of the later chapters conveyed more than I wanted to know about human nature.The violence was too real, too depraved.Worse, there was no hope. Not a shred of optimism anywhere.That said, I did come away with one positive observation. It seemed to me that, without saying so, Ellis may have been trying to show us — in graphic and convincing detail — that riches, fame, and the ability to do whatever we want are not enough to satisfy.Not unless we have better imaginations than his characters.
    • 4/5
      I expected great things from this collection of interwoven stories after reading Bret's other novels, and I was not disappointed. Not all the stories are great, but most are trademark Ellis, written in a detached yet poignant manner that gave me a really cohesive vision of the time and place that he is trying to get at in the novel. 'The Up Escalator' is a particular favorite, as the sparse prose captures the modern banality of LA brilliantly. Ellis is one of my favorite authors, and this collection did nothing to change that.
    • 3/5
      This book is like a movie that comes on cable on a Saturday afternoon. You wouldn't see it in the theater, but you don't change the channel once it's started. Well, I suppose you might change the channel; it depends on which of these stories you happen upon. A few are really, pointlessly horrid, though I did rather like the bit about the vampires and the one about the trip to the zoo. The description of the zoo, in particular, has a nice wholesome nastiness to it (hissing kangaroos). Though he improved with Lunar Park, Ellis has a bad habit of writing prose so blank and neutral that it caves in on itself and reads as terribly affected and portentous. Pop nihilism in snack form.
    • 2/5
      Disappointing sequel to 'Less Than Zero.' Except for a few stories/chapters that are devastating in their simplicity, the whole thing feels thrown together. One might imagine that this book is comprised of rejected ideas from the original.